Paul Davidson has been filming and interviewing the old whalers, volunteers and DOC staff for several years as they go about their whale survey work. He is nearing completion of an extended version of his documentary “Once Were Whalers”, which will be released 2017.The Department of Conservation is in the tenth year survey of humpback whales, which pass through Cook Strait in June and July on their annual migration from Antarctica to warmer Pacific waters. This year plenty of whales were sighted in the first few days of the survey, and the DOC crew got good ID photographs and blubber samples from most of them.